Emoji in LaTeX documents

Alec Jacobson

August 05, 2014

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Update: Hilariously, it turns out that either wordpress or my wordpress markdown plugin is choking on the emoji inserted into this post. Thus, to see the actually emoji commands see this plaintext version


We were recently joking around about using emoji in math equations. The idea was to satire of the bad rap exterior calculus symbols like the the Hodge star operator (★) and the "musical isomorphisms" (♭,♯) get in the computer graphics community.

I found a solution for upTeX. This works by first extracting all of the emojis as pdfs and then including the pdfs via (includegraphics) whenever a \coloremoji{...} command is found. This unfortunately did not work with my TexLive pdflatex setup. With some help, I've redesigned a coloremoji.sty stylesheet that allows you to directly include emoji in your LaTeX documents.

A Hello, EmojiWorld LaTeX document would look like this:

Wordpress dies on emoji, see plaintext version

This produces something that should look like:

hello world emoji

You can also use emoji in mathmode:

Wordpress dies on emoji, see plaintext version

alligator power integral math emoji latex

Download the coloremoji package and simply add \usepackage{coloremoji} to the top of your document.

Actually, Nobuyuki Umetani gave a talk where he used graphic icons in math (I believe successfully!) to explain Sensitive Couture (change in clothing with respect to change in mouse interaction):

Nobuyuki's emoji math

Update: I'm now hosting this style package on github.